Main Feature
‘She Leant Back to Obtain More Thorough Rest’
Volume 32 Issue 1, 2 & 3 | Posted: March 14, 2018
One week before she died, Deirdre Kelly was honoured at a memorial of sorts by her social activist, Catholic and artist friends who decided to hold a benefit supper for her at a venue where her Central America Support Committee (CASC) comrades had met for decades.
Neither she nor John her husband and partner of 35 years were able to attend due to the stage of her illness. Tickets had sold out early and it was for the purpose of helping with the cost of the nursing aid that had to come in to help with her care.
On February 5, eight days after her death on January 28, her funeral was held at Holy Cross parish in Gordon Head. While she was a regular attender at St. Joseph’s friary, where her uncle Paul Surette had been a priest, Holy Cross would be large enough to hold the crowd.
One week before she died, Deirdre Kelly was honoured at a memorial of sorts by her social activist, Catholic and artist friends who decided to hold a benefit supper for her at a venue where her Central America Support Committee (CASC) comrades had met for decades.
Neither she nor John her husband and partner of 35 years were able to attend due to the stage of her illness. Tickets had sold out early and it was for the purpose of helping with the cost of the nursing aid that had to come in to help with her care.
On February 5, eight days after her death on January 28, her funeral was held at Holy Cross parish in Gordon Head. While she was a regular attender at St. Joseph’s friary, where her uncle Paul Surette had been a priest, Holy Cross would be large enough to hold the crowd.
Deirdre was just 65 years old at the time of her death. When someone dies that young most of their close friends and associates are still alive to attend the funeral so the numbers were large. It was a crowd tangibly suffering from the shock of the swift passage. Suffering with a persistent cough the previous spring, a fast acting cancer took her life.
2.
I have long been a Deirdre Kelly fan, of her activism, her socially conscious art and her whole person and personalist way of being. She was the seminal social activist Catholic in the 1980s and 90s when it meant something. Catching fire at the time of the Nicaraguan revolution in Central America, when there was a surge of liberation theology and spirituality in Catholic circles. She has written that it was Bishop Remi De Roo’s report on his fact finding trip to Latin America in the early 1980s that opened her eyes and her heart to the suffering of the people of that region.
Locally she seemed to manifest the spirit of the Catholic social activism on every front, even employed by the Diocese of Victoria under Bishop De Roo and beyond. She was an invaluable resource at the pastoral centre when I was writing my books of the history of the diocese and biographical volumes on Bishop De Roo’s career.
Monsignor Michael Lapierre, her colleague at the chancery in those days, did a masterful job of officiating at her funeral, reaching the right blend of open spirit with a largely secular crowd and yet catching the sacramental purpose of Deirdre’s calling and principled ethical stands.
3.
It was the same main speakers who addressed both receptions at the two events. Carlos Flores, the Chilean-Canadian communist organizer, Peter Golden, the progressive human rights lawyer and Nancy Murphy, her artist associate and a mainstay friend.
Carlos loved the way Deirdre never showed the least difficulty with any difference in the belief systems of her comrades. He said he grew to respect her faith basis of action. Peter told stories of how she never lost her humanity in the heat of the action, even when they were at personal risk.
Nancy recalled how Deirdre met her by mistake and a fast friendship instantly resulted as they both progressed as creative artist partners on many projects. Deirdre’s art was voluminous in its production and she was developing it by leaps and bounds, inspired by such local legendary painters as Jim Gordaneer, also an admirer of liberation theology.
I spoke off the cuff at both events about the heroism and sanctity she manifested at every turn over thirty years of acquaintanceship, on the board of the ICN, as my father’s advocate at the Diocese for this thirty years of refugee sponsorship work.
In those years she and John lived at Mitraniketan Housing co-op with so many other heroes and saints like Peter Boles, Sister Helene Corneau (see letter page five) Laura and Richard Johnson and even one of former premier Dave Barrett's sons (see story page one), on Balmoral Street in intentional Christian community where they lived out the social gospel mission of the church in a creatively original way.
To visualize Deirdre as solely an anarchist activist would be to do injustice to her whole being. To me she was not so much larger than life but as vibrantly immediate as life. To be in her presence was to experience layers of life consisting of confiding irony, laughter at the ludicrous and absurd, revelation of her secrets and plans. She manifested a humanity that embodied hope.
Other lines from the Thomas Hardy excerpt on the funeral program read: “While she looked a heron arose on that side of the sky and flew on with his face to the sun…. Up in the zenith where he was, seemed a free and happy place…she wished that she could arise uncrushed from its surface and fly as he flew then.”
I can’t help but compare her to Dorothy Day, founder of the Catholic Worker movement which persists today in an inviolable spirit.
As her comrades called out at her funeral: ‘DEIRDRE KELLY PRESENTE.’